Vickers VR180 Vigor

The Vickers VR180 Vigor was a British crawler tractor built from 1951 to 1958 by Vickers-Armstrongs at its Scotswood works in Newcastle upon Tyne. The company had built tanks and tracked vehicles since the 1920s and developed a civilian crawler after the war for peacetime reconstruction work. Its chassis was unusually sophisticated: four full-height roadwheels that also served as rear drive sprocket, front idler and track return rollers, the same layout as the Tetrarch light tank, with bogie suspension that allowed speeds of nearly 10 mph where a Caterpillar D8 managed 5 mph. It used a Rolls-Royce C6SFL 12.17 litre six-cylinder supercharged diesel giving 190 hp at the engine, with a three-speed gearbox and later an optional Rolls-Royce torque converter. Roughly 1,500 were built, most sold in the Commonwealth, many to Australia. The Vigor chassis became the basis of several Thunderbird 2 pod vehicles in Gerry Anderson's Thunderbirds.